Sandy Szwarc, BSN, RN, CCP, at the Junkfood Science blog, writes some great articles. The one posted on April 7, 2008, called “House-to-house searches — for twinkies and guns?” is yet another fantastic article.
She talks about the recent initiatives by police in Boston, MA, and Washington, D.C., to go house to house in specified neighborhoods and, without warrants, search homes for guns. The populace has been mostly against this, it seems (which is good to hear), but plans to do such things still grind forward.
This is linked to health searches of homes — proposed in England, California, Missouri and New York — to curb health problems related to sexual activity, eating and smoking (three of the golden pleasures, in my book).
As part of the plans of Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, “unfit and overweight Britons will get doorstep visits from NHS staff to track those at risk of future illness.”
Proposals were made by the California Department of Health for door-to-door searches of young Latina and African American women in low-income neighborhoods to assess their health risk behaviors, purportedly to tackle HIV and STDs.
A program funded by the National Cancer Institute, targeted 350,000 families of preschoolers in St. Louis, Missouri, who received a knock on the door asking them about their eating habits, going through their pantries and reviewing their grocery shopping lists.
A similar anti-obesity initiative was introduced last summer by Dr. Mehmet Oz, author of the You on a diet diet book and an Oprah regular. Funded by $250,000 from the New York City Council, the program he founded is called HealthCorps. Modeled after the Peace Corps, it pays college graduates to go around the city and council kids on diet and exercise.
And why should ALL of us be concerned about “reasonable” gun control measures?
Jews were prohibited from owning guns by order of SS Reichsführer Himmler on November 10, 1938, said professor Halbrook, and all weapons were confiscated in a door-to-door search known as the Night of the Broken Glass. [Image from People’s Observer, November 10, 1938.] As the New York Times had reported that November, in just weeks the entire Jewish population of Berlin had been disarmed, and any resistors were shot. Finding those Jews who had firearms was simple, because the laws from 1928 required extensive police records on gun owners and the police used gun registrations.
“The disarming of the Jews made individual or collective resistance in the future impossible,” [Stephen P. Halbrook, Ph.D., J.D.] concluded in the Arizona journal. “The record establishes that a well-meaning liberal republic would enact a gun control act that would later be highly useful to a dictatorship. That dictatorship could then consolidate its power by massive search and seizure operations against political opponents… It could enact its own new firearms law, disarming anyone the police deemed dangerous…”
Simply put, guns and knives and all kinds of weapons should not be registered with any government agency. Registration is a big part of our lives, from homes to cars to our very selves (Driver’s Licenses and Social Security numbers), and being without it is not easily envisioned. However, any and all encroachments should be dealt with sceptically and harshly, with the understanding that other people rarely know better than you how to live your own life.
The pantry police are not good for you or your ability to live freely and as you see fit, and that’s just one of the thousands (literally) of proposals and laws that treat you more like a child and less like an adult.
